The two-day event will be held at the UAB Alumni House and is free to all UAB faculty, staff and students.

“This is a unique event that is completely student-run and student-organized, and it serves the very important function of bringing together many of the top researchers and clinicians from across the university,” said Timothy Wick, Ph.D., senior associate dean in the School of Engineering. “It’s an important event in that it gives our students some exposure and opportunities to network with industry leaders, and it also facilitates communication between researchers from different parts of campus.”

The event is organized by the Biomedical Engineering Graduate Student Organization.

This year’s event will feature a keynote address by Donna Arnett, Ph.D., chair and professor in the UAB Department of Epidemiology and past-president of the American Heart Association. Other speakers include Ashley Boam from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration; Art Tipton, Ph.D., from Southern Research Institute; Rosario Lizio, Ph.D., from Evonik; and Hassan Fathallah-Shaykh, M.D.. James Rimmer, Ph.D., and Rosa Serra, Ph.D., from UAB.

For more information or to register for the event, visit the symposium website.

A medical device is any medical instrument, as opposed to a drug, that is used to diagnose, prevent or treat a disease or medical condition. New diagnostic imaging, surgical tools and therapeutic implants are examples of what the U.S. Food & Drug Administration defines as medical devices.

Southern Research Institute and UAB researchers will work together to create medical devices across all five specializations. The goal is for the first group of AIMTech-created medical devices to hit the market by 2020. By comparison, it can take 10 years to create an FDA-approved drug.

The idea for the new alliance arose from discussions between Art Tipton, Ph.D., president and CEO of Southern Research Institute, and Timothy Wick, Ph.D., chair of the UAB Department of Biomedical Engineering. Tipton holds 34 U.S. patents, helped lead the growth of three pharmaceutical/biotech companies, and launched four commercial products.

“Partnering with UAB on this initiative allows us to accelerate commercialization of medical technologies, improve healthcare delivery and outcomes, and generate economic development and growth,” said Tipton. “This is also an opportunity to develop a lucrative business unit that will potentially create a number of new companies and jobs within the rapidly-growing biomedical engineering industry.”

UAB professor David Brown, Ph.D., and AIMTech Director Robert Hergenrother, Ph.D., work with a UAB grad student to test a device currently under development by AIMTech.“Our partnership with Southern Research Institute in the Alabama Drug Discovery Alliance has already been a tremendous success,” said UAB President Ray L. Watts, M.D. “We have approximately 18 new disease-changing therapies in the ADDA pipeline. We’re pushing hard to bring them to market as new treatments as rapidly as possible, which could have incredible health care and economic development implications. We envision a similar impact with the AIMTech collaboration.”

Watts, who is both a physician and an engineer, understands the importance of design in the development of new medical devices.

Tipton hired Robert Hergenrother, Ph.D., as the director of AIMTech. Hergenrother has led the creation of 15 neurovascular, diagnostic, wound care, and orthopedic medical devices during his career. He ran research and development for the medical device business unit of Minnesota-based SurModics and led a team of engineers at California-based Target Therapeutics, now Stryker Neurovascular. Eighteen of his inventions have been patented in the U.S. Hergenrother has also been appointed professor in UAB’s biomedical engineering department.

AIMTech will invent the new medical devices, help raise venture capital, establish small medical device companies, and manage the clinical trial and FDA approval processes. Major medical device companies will manufacture and sell the devices.

AIMTech will gain a return on investment through research grants, licensing, royalty fees and equity arrangements.

“We have all the ingredients here to create a powerhouse in the medical device industry,” said Hergenrother. “But what’s more exciting than that, is knowing that we’ll be creating the technology that will help patients live longer and more active lives.”

AIMTech will invent the new medical devices, help raise venture capital, establish small medical device companies, and manage the clinical trial and FDA approval processes. Major medical device companies will manufacture and sell the devices.

“The regional investment community is excited to see these two Birmingham powerhouses coming together to develop medical devices,” said Robert L. Crutchfield, general partner, Harbert Venture Partners. “Combining the research and innovation development resources at UAB with the commercialization expertise, experience, and capabilities at Southern Research Institute should create value by increasing the number of UAB commercial spin outs.”

According to the U.S. Department of Commerce, the U.S. medical device industry is expected to grow nearly 21 percent to $133 billion by 2016. The Bureau of Labor Statistics projects 27 percent job growth in the industry between 2012 and 2022, with a median pay of about $87,000 a year.

Looking forward to a promising 2015, UAB News revisits some top stories of 2014.

The University of Alabama at Birmingham experienced many successes and milestones in 2014, including student accomplishments, faculty hires, records set, campus improvements, groundbreaking research and more.

The new UAB Student Health and Wellness Center opened in September 2014. It boasts 23,000 square feet of space dedicated to the health, counseling and wellness needs of UAB students. A new freshman residence hall will open in summer 2015 and will house more than 700 students. By the fall semester, students, faculty and staff will enjoy the new 159,000-square-foot UAB Student Center, which will be home to student services and activities, as well as Full Moon Bar-B-Que, Panera Bread, Mein Bowl and Starbucks.

“Excitement for the construction of a new student center is growing,” said Carolyn Farley, director of Academic and Student Services. “This incredible building will create a much better student experience.”

Thousands of middle and high school students in Alabama’s Black Belt will be on the path to higher education in 2015, as UAB recently secured the largest nonhealth-related grant in its history to lead the U.S. Department of Education’s Gaining Early Awareness and Readiness for Undergraduate Programs (GEAR UP) grant program in Alabama. The UAB School of Education has been awarded a seven-year, $49 million grant to increase the number of low-income students prepared to enter and succeed in postsecondary education. UAB will serve as the hub of GEAR UP Alabama. This is the first time Alabama has been awarded funds from GEAR UP, which began in 1998.

UAB is making significant investments in UAB Teach, which gives undergraduate students studying science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) disciplines the ability to enhance career opportunities while improving education across Alabama.

UAB honors student Ameen Barghi was elected to the Rhodes Scholar Class of 2015. He is one of 32 outstanding students in the United States who will start their all-expenses-paid, graduate educations at Oxford University next fall. Barghi is the third UAB student since 2000 named as a Rhodes Scholar.

Barghi, 22, was able to work on computational analyses of MRI neuroimaging, publishing five papers in peer-reviewed research journals as part of the lab of Edward Taub, Ph.D., a world-renowned behavioral neuroscientist in UAB’s psychology department in the UAB College of Arts and Sciences.

“I had the opportunity to learn clinical neuroscience at its finest,” Barghi said. “I’m getting experiences at UAB that kids from the best institutions around the world can’t get.”

Some of the transformational research produced yearly by UAB investigators is supported in part by funding from the National Institutes of Health. In 2014, UAB NIH funding increased by 20 percent to $225 million, which puts UAB 10th among public universities, and several of its schools highly ranked nationally.

In 2014, countless published articles from UAB-affiliated authors appeared on ScienceDirect, the world’s leading source for scientific, technical and medical research. Over the last four years, UAB articles published on ScienceDirect combined for an average of more than 1 million downloads a year.

“UAB and SRI have spent a lot of time, money and energy developing the ADDA over the last five years,” Whitley said. “This grant shows how that investment can pay off.”

A UAB School of Optometry researcher is studying a leading cause of death among newborns worldwide. Group B Streptococcus is a bacterium carried by about 40 percent of healthy women, and as many as 25 percent pass it to their infants during birth, despite screening and preventive treatment. Narayana Sthanam, Ph.D., professor of structural biology in the School of Optometry, is working to discover how it escapes the mother’s natural defense systems in hopes that knowledge will lead to a therapeutic intervention. His research is funded by a $1 million R01 grant from the NIH/NIAID.

The start of 2015 will see recruitment begin for a potentially groundbreaking human clinical trial to test a drug shown to completely reverse diabetes in human islets and mice. The three-year, $2.1 million trial funded by the JDRF, known as “the repurposing of verapamil as a beta cell survival therapy in type 1 diabetes,” has come to fruition after more than a decade of research efforts in UAB’s Comprehensive Diabetes Center. Too much of the protein TXNIP – which is increased within pancreatic beta cells in response to diabetes – leads to cell death and thwarts the body’s efforts to produce insulin, thereby contributing to the progression of diabetes.

“We have previously shown that verapamil can prevent diabetes and even reverse the disease in mouse models and reduce TXNIP in human islet beta cells, suggesting that it may have beneficial effects in humans as well,” said Anath Shalev, M.D., principal investigator of the verapamil clinical trial and director of the Comprehensive Diabetes Center.

The nation’s largest single-site kidney transplant chain will also continue into 2015 at UAB. The UAB kidney chain began Dec. 5, 2013, and was featured nationally on the ABC News program “Nightline” on July 3, 2014, and across multiple news outlets. The program featured several members of the current chain and showcased the work of UAB Medicine physicians, nurses and staff who helped make this lifesaving, complex chain a reality.

“To me, these are miracles,” said Jayme Locke, M.D., surgical director of the Incompatible Kidney Transplant ProgramUAB’s School of Medicine and coordinator of the chain. “From our perspective, this is a significant achievement for the 100,000 people around the country on the waiting list for a transplant, including almost 4,000 people here in Alabama.”

Cancer survivors will continue to have the opportunity to cope, heal and grow, thanks to Harvest for Health, a UAB study that pairs cancer survivors with master gardeners from the Alabama Cooperative Extension System. Harvest for Health began with a pilot study in Jefferson County, Alabama, in 2011.

“We asked the question ‘If cancer survivors started a vegetable garden, would they eat more vegetables?’” said Wendy Demark-Wahnefried, Ph.D., R.D., associate director for Cancer Prevention and Control in the UAB Comprehensive Cancer Center and a professor in the Department of Nutrition Sciences in the UAB School of Health Professions. “We found they not only ate more vegetables, they also got more exercise. And their physical functioning improved dramatically,” she said, noting that the study has since been expanded to many counties surrounding Birmingham, along with the Cullman, Montgomery, Mobile and Dothan areas, with support from the National Cancer Institute.

Younger’s work at Stanford yielded new treatments for pain and fatigue, and he is continuing that work at UAB. “We believe that, in many cases when someone is suffering from chronic pain or fatigue, they may be suffering from low-level inflammation in their brain,” Younger said. “We are investigating ways to return the brain to its normal state.”

The UAB School of Nursing and Birmingham VA Medical Center are again expanding their 43-year-old partnership and the focus on veterans' mental health needs. Created with a five-year grant from the Veterans Health Administration to the Birmingham VAMC, the two are partnering on the VA Nursing Academic Partnerships in Graduate Education (VANAP-GE), the only one of its kind in the country, and will put 48 new psychiatric-mental health nurse practitioners into the VA workforce over the next five years.

The School of Nursing’s ongoing partnership with the Birmingham VAMC played a role in the site’s selection, says Cynthia Selleck, Ph.D., R.N., FNP, the School’s associate dean for Clinical and Global Partnerships. Since 2008, the two institutions have worked together on several key projects, including the VA Nursing Academy Partnership, which teams VA Medical Centers with accredited schools of nursing with the goal of providing compassionate, highly educated nurses to meet the health care needs of America’s heroes.

The UAB School of Dentistry has secured several grants to improve oral health care and access in Alabama and is applying for more to continue widening its scope. With the help of community collaborations, the School of Dentistry has the ability to use its resources to improve the oral health of Alabamians and positively shape the education of the students within the school.

“We like our students to be exposed to these types of activities and initiatives because it gives them a broader perspective,” said Allen Conan Davis, DMD, assistant dean for Community Collaborations and Public Health in the School of Dentistry. “Many of our students choose to do a year’s extension program with a general practice residency, and we want to provide opportunities in the state so they will stay here. By locating them in nearby areas, we hope they will choose to practice in these areas, too.”

UAB will also continue using arts education to empower young people in the Woodlawn community through the ArtReach program, which has had over 1,500 participants since its inception. ArtReach is an endeavor of ArtPlay, the Alys Stephens Performing Arts Center’s home for arts education.

ArtPlay will present two premieres for the upcoming 2015 season: “The Clever George Washington Carver” on Saturday, Feb. 21, and DanceE’s “A DanceE Wild Rumpus” on Sunday, April 26.

The ASC’s new season of shows will feature legendary and rising artists including Branford Marsalis, The Jung Trio, Arlo Guthrie, Aaron Neville Duo, the Wailers, California and Montreal Guitar Trios, Diana Krall, Australia’s Sway Poles, Steve Winwood, and Dr. John and the Nite Trippers. Young Concert Artists and rising stars Andrew Tyson and Julia Bullock will bookend the season and perform as part of the intimate ArtPlay Parlor Music Series. For tickets, a copy of The Center Magazine or more information, call 205-975-2787 or visit www.AlysStephens.org.

The “repurposing of verapamil as a beta cell survival therapy in type 1 diabetes” trial will test an approach different from any current diabetes treatment.

New research conducted at the University of Alabama at Birmingham has shown that the common blood pressure drug verapamil completely reverses diabetes in animal models. Now, thanks to a three-year, $2.1 million grant from the JDRF, UAB researchers will begin conducting a potentially groundbreaking clinical trial in 2015 to see if it can do the same in humans.

The trial, known as “the repurposing of verapamil as a beta cell survival therapy in type 1 diabetes,” is scheduled to begin early next year and has come to fruition after more than a decade of research efforts in UAB’s Comprehensive Diabetes Center.

The trial will test an approach different from any current diabetes treatment by focusing on promoting specialized cells in the pancreas called beta cells, which produce insulin the body needs to control blood sugar. UAB scientists have proved through years of research that high blood sugar causes the body to overproduce a protein called TXNIP, which is increased within the beta cells in response to diabetes, but had never previously been known to be important in beta cell biology. Too much TXNIP in the pancreatic beta cells leads to their deaths and thwarts the body’s efforts to produce insulin, thereby contributing to the progression of diabetes.

But UAB scientists have also uncovered that the drug verapamil, which is widely used to treat high blood pressure, irregular heartbeat and migraine headaches, can lower TXNIP levels in these beta cells — to the point that, when mouse models with established diabetes and blood sugars above 300 milligrams per deciliter were treated with verapamil, the disease was eradicated.

About the verapamil clinical trial

Recruitment for the trial will begin in early 2015.

The trial will enroll 52 people between the ages of 19 and 45 within three months of receiving a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes.

Patients enrolled will be randomized to receive verapamil or a placebo for one year while continuing with their insulin pump therapy.

Patients will receive a continuous glucose monitoring system that will enable them to measure their blood sugar 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Talk to your primary care physician if you are experiencing excessive thirst, excessive urination or unwanted weight loss in association with fatigue.

For more information or to enroll, contact Kentress Davison at 205-934-4112 or 205-975-9308. To speak to a physician, contact Fernando Ovalle, M.D., at 205-934-4171.

“We have previously shown that verapamil can prevent diabetes and even reverse the disease in mouse models and reduce TXNIP in human islet beta cells, suggesting that it may have beneficial effects in humans as well,” said Anath Shalev, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Diabetes Center and principal investigator of the verapamil clinical trial. “That is a proof-of-concept that, by lowering TXNIP, even in the context of the worst diabetes, we have beneficial effects. And all of this addresses the main underlying cause of the disease — beta cell loss. Our current approach attempts to target this loss by promoting the patient’s own beta cell mass and insulin production. There is currently no treatment available that targets diabetes in this way.”

The trial will enroll 52 people between the ages of 19 and 45 within three months of receiving a diagnosis of type 1 diabetes. Patients enrolled will be randomized to receive verapamil or a placebo for one year while continuing with their insulin pump therapy. In addition, they will receive a continuous glucose monitoring system that will enable them to measure their blood sugar 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

Fernando Ovalle, M.D., director of UAB’s Comprehensive Diabetes Clinic and co-principal investigator of the study, helped develop the clinical trial and will oversee all clinical aspects of the trial, including subject recruitment, treatment, testing, and data acquisition and analysis. Recruitment for the trial will begin in early 2015.

“Currently, we can prescribe external insulin and other medications to lower blood sugar; but we have no way to stop the destruction of beta cells, and the disease continues to get worse,” Ovalle said. “If verapamil works in humans, it would be a truly revolutionary development in a disease affecting more people each year to the tune of billions of dollars annually.”

Battling a health crisis

Diabetes, which is the nation’s seventh-leading cause of death, raises risks for heart attacks, blindness, kidney disease and limb amputation. Recent federal government statistics show that 12.3 percent of Americans 20 and older have diabetes, either diagnosed or undiagnosed. Another 37 percent have pre-diabetes, a condition marked by higher-than-normal blood sugar. That is up from 27 percent a decade ago.

While a new report in the Journal of the American Medical Association showed rates at which new cases are accumulating have slowed in recent years, the numbers remain high and are still increasing overall, with 8.3 percent of adults diagnosed with the disease as of 2012. And no slowing of the disease has been seen in new cases among blacks and Hispanics or in overall rates among people with high school educations or less.

Plus, the annual cost to treat the disease is exorbitant — and rising. The American Diabetes Association reports that the disease cost the nation $245 billion in 2013.

Researchers have known for some time that beta cells are critical in type 1 and type 2 diabetes. The cells are gradually lost in both types of the disease due to programmed cell death, but the exact triggers for the deaths were previously unknown. Somewhat surprisingly, it was also noted that, after years — decades, even — of living with type 1 diabetes, where beta cells were thought to be completely destroyed early on by the autoimmune process, patients still had a measurable amount of beta cell function; it just was not enough to maintain a normal blood sugar.

Shalev says replacing this beta cell mass by transplantation has proved more difficult and problematic than initially thought, but creating an environment that would enable beta cells to survive and possibly regenerate or become functional again does provide an attractive alternative by increasing the body’s own beta cell mass. UAB lab studies have shown verapamil to be extremely effective in this area, which has helped to make this clinical trial — funded by the JDRF, the largest charitable supporter of type 1 diabetes research — a possibility now.

JDRF is funding this study as part of its beta cell restoration research program whose goal is to restore a person’s ability to produce their own insulin — in essence, a biological cure for type 1 diabetes.

“A first step towards that goal may be the ability to improve the survival and functioning of a person’s beta cells shortly after diagnosis,” said JDRF director of Discovery Research, Andrew Rakeman, Ph.D. “This study represents the result of years of investment in basic research at JDRF. We are now at the stage of translating basic laboratory research into potential significant new therapies for type 1 diabetes and we’re excited to support Dr. Shalev’s team to test this concept in a study of people with type 1 diabetes. Finding a therapy to improve beta cell survival and functioning would put JDRF’s efforts to find a cure on a new trajectory.”

Ovalle will manage all patients with the use of insulin pumps and continuous glucose sensors and co-manage patients who are already seeing another endocrinologist remotely. UAB’s clinic team will analyze patients’ blood sugar control and their ability to produce insulin. They will also use a more complex test known as c-peptide response as a way to measure beta cell insulin production and functional beta cell mass.

One of the truly unique and different aspects of this clinical trial is that, unlike most type 1 diabetes trials, the verapamil trial does not include the use of any immunosuppressive or immune modulatory medications, which often have very severe side effects.

“This trial is based on a well-known blood pressure medication that has been used for more than 30 years and is unlikely to have any severe side effects,” Shalev said. “This study is also backed by a lot of strong mechanistic data in different mouse models and human islets, and we already know the mechanisms by which verapamil acts. Finally, unlike any currently available diabetes treatment, the trial targets the patient’s own natural beta cell mass and insulin production.”

Discovery RouteMore than a decade of basic-science breakthroughs in the lab of Anath Shalev, M.D., led to this new verapamil study at UAB. Follow Shalev’s trail of discovery, from a simple question to a completely novel approach for diabetes treatment, in The Mix, UAB’s research blog.

A first step

Shalev says the trial is a first step in the direction of such a novel diabetes treatment approach.

“While in a best-case scenario, the patients would have an increase in beta cells to the point that they produce enough insulin and no longer require any insulin injections — thereby representing a total cure — this is extremely unlikely to happen in the current trial, especially given its short duration of only one year,” Shalev said.

Shalev expects verapamil to have a much more subtle yet extremely important effect.

“We know from previous large clinical studies that even a small amount of the patient’s own remaining beta cell mass has major beneficial outcomes and reduces complications,” Shalev said. “That’s probably because even a little bit of our body’s own beta cells can respond much more adequately to very fine fluctuations in our blood sugar — much more than we can ever do with injections or even sophisticated insulin pumps.”

Because verapamil’s mode of action is different from current drugs or interventions, this opens up an entirely new field for diabetes drug discovery — one that UAB’s Comprehensive Diabetes Center is already engaged in with the Alabama Drug Discovery Alliance, a partnership between UAB’s School of Medicine and Southern Research Institute. The group is actively looking for small therapeutic molecules that inhibit TXNIP to protect the beta cells and treat diabetes.

“We want to find new drugs — different from any current diabetes treatments — that can help halt the growing, worldwide epidemic of diabetes and improve the lives of those affected by this disease,” Shalev said. “Finally, we have reason to believe that we are on the right track.”

Shalev says none of the research leading up to this point — nor the clinical trial itself — would have been possible without the existence of the UAB Comprehensive Diabetes Center and the continued support of the community. To fund this and other diabetes research at UAB, visit the Comprehensive Diabetes Center.

Those funds have spurred scientific research, recruited new faculty and produced new knowledge in treating lung injury, especially from chemical agents such as chlorine, ammonia and bromine.

Chlorine, ammonia and bromine are commonly used in various industrial applications and are routinely shipped across the country. Exposure to these agents could come as a result of a deliberate terror attack or from an inadvertent leak from a transportation mishap.

“Inhalation of these gases can cause extreme, possibly fatal injury to the lungs,” said Sadis Matalon, Ph.D., distinguished professor and vice chair for research in the Department of Anesthesiology, and director of the center. “Our research is geared toward finding countermeasures that could be employed to minimize pulmonary injury in the event of a chlorine, ammonia or bromine release, whatever the cause may be.”

The UAB center is part of the federal government’s CounterACT Program. Funded by the National Institutes of Health, CounterACT is a translational research program aimed at the discovery and/or identification of better therapeutic medical countermeasures and technologies against chemical threat agents. CounterACT was launched following the terror attacks on Sept. 11, 2001, as awareness grew of potential threats from chemical agents.

UAB is one of the few research institutions in the nation involved in countermeasure research against chlorine and ammonia, and it is the only site looking for agents that would be effective against bromine, according to Matalon.

“We are investigating multiple strategies to respond to lung injury in the event of exposure to these agents,” Matalon said. “We have identified compounds that in preliminary studies have been shown to prevent death after chlorine exposure, for example. Compounds such as antioxidants and nitrites also have promise in reducing or reversing the toxic effects of these agents.”

Matalon says one of the center’s strengths is its reach across the breadth of UAB. Investigators involved in the major projects come from multiple disciplines and include Victor Darley-Usmar, Ph.D., and Jianhua Zhang, Ph.D., pathology; Tim Ness, M.D., anesthesiology; Chad Steele, Ph.D., and Veena Antony, M.D., pulmonary medicine; Rakesh Patel, Ph.D., molecular and cellular pathology; Mohammad Athar, dermatology; and Anupam Agarwal, M.D., nephrology. Other prominent investigators include Edward Postlethwait, Ph.D., Michelle Fanucchi, Ph.D., and Giuseppe Squadrito, Ph.D., in the School of Public Health; as well as James and Diana Noah, Ph.D.s, with Southern Research Institute.

Matalon and Darley-Usmar received a grant to test the role of mitochondrial injury in the initiation and propagation of chlorine injury to the lungs. Matalon is also collaborating with Sven Eric Jordt, Ph.D., of Yale University, to test the effectiveness of a new class of anti-inflammatory agents to decrease chlorine injury.

Patel was recently funded by the CounterACT Program to test the efficacy of nitrites to decrease mortality and lung injury in chlorine-exposed animals. Athar is funded by CounterACT to develop therapeutic interventions of lewisite-mediated injury to the skin, which could contribute to lung injury. Ness was also funded to investigate whether local anesthetics administered post-exposure reduce pain.

“This is a critical issue because people who experience pain have decreased ability to walk away from the epicenter of a chemical attack,” Matalon said.

The center also played a role in the recruitment of prominent new faculty to UAB, says Matalon, including Victor Thannickal, M.D., chair of the Division of Pulmonary, Allergy and Critical Care Medicine, and Jean-Francois Pittet, M.D., professor of anesthesiology.

“The Pulmonary Injury and Repair Center has enhanced collaborations among basic and clinical investigators at UAB and has driven translational research in lung injury and repair,” Matalon said. “It has also strengthened existing interactions among researchers from UAB and Southern Research Institute. These interactions continue to improve our ability to attract new faculty interested in pulmonary research at UAB and to compete for extramural awards.”